Spanish Language

Seeking to shore up its weakness in international news and in cable, Westinghouse/CBS said Thursday that it will buy the world's leading 24-hour Spanish-language cable news channel for an undisclosed sum that sources estimate at less than $25 million. The purchase of Telenoticias from the Spanish broadcaster Telemundo is one of several cable deals CBS has in the works, according to cable industry and Wall Street sources.

August 17, 1996 | MARIO VALENZUELA and MARIO VALENZUELA, Mario Valenzuela graduated from UCLA and works in community relations

When my family and I came to the U.S. from Chile, my mom and dad worked at the Sheraton Hotel all day; my sister and I were at a child care center. My sister, since she was 2 and I, since I was 4, have been immersed in the English language. For a child, a new language is not difficult to learn if you are being spoken to in English by every adult and peer except your parents. The nursery rhymes, the stories and television were all in English.

Growing up in his native Cuba, Alexis Torres resorted to putting fake covers on books so he could read literature that wasn't government-approved. "When I was a teenager, you could definitely get arrested" for reading "enemy propaganda" like Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's works, Torres said. But that didn't stop him from reading as many books as he could get his hands on. Torres' fascination with books led him to pass up a lucrative law career to open a Spanish-language bookstore.

Rosa Castiel sighs wearily as she watches her staff file out of their Carson office after another 10-hour day. "We're each doing the work of three people," says the director of operations for Fernandez Publishing, the second subsidiary of a major Mexican publishing house to open a U.S. office. Not that Castiel is complaining, mind you. After all, things are much better than they were just 20 months ago, when her staff didn't even have an office to file out of.

Last year, Pepsi-Cola held a nationwide contest aimed at Latino consumers. The grand prize winners were to receive $150,000 toward the purchase of a house. In Los Angeles, the contest was promoted primarily in Spanish. But in Albuquerque, N.M., the campaign was advertised mostly in English. Pepsi's reasoning: Most Latinos in Albuquerque had lived in the United States for generations and tended to use more English.

ABC News has quietly shut down its "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings" simultaneous Spanish-language translation service, saying it was too expensive given that there was little evidence many people were using it. The translation service, available via a TV set's Secondary Audio Program channel, was also provided on occasion for other ABC News programs, including special "Nightline" broadcasts and last year's presidential election coverage.

For the past 14 years, Los Angeles-based rock en espanol entrepreneur Tomas Cookman has championed the music that he passionately believes in, dreaming of the day when the Latin alternative movement becomes part of the American mainstream.

It's "Soul Train" en espanol, the Latin "American Bandstand"--a television show featuring top musical acts of Spanish-speaking America with interludes of nightclub-style dancing. The show: "Mexicanisimo," a one-hour program taped in Anaheim and airing every Sunday at 6 p.m. on KWHY-TV Channel 22. The show frequently spotlights bands from Billboard Magazine's Top 40 Latin charts.

Telemundo and its Glendale-based flagship station, KVEA-TV Channel 52, will announce a major prime-time programming shake-up next month designed to make the network and its affiliates more competitive with Univision, the dominant force in Spanish-language broadcasting in the United States. Nationally, Telemundo stations will move their local newscasts up an hour to 10 p.m. beginning Aug. 11, positioning them as the earliest nightly Spanish-language news in most markets.